US explorers try their hand at Cooper oil

The revival of the Cooper Basin oil and gas province has been reinforced by the success of a Houston-based explorer in securing a joint venture partner to drill exploration wells in two licences.

Toronto-listed Brandenburg Metals joined Holloman Energy to drill in two permits in the Western Flank oil district, where Australian companies
Beach Energy
,
Drillsearch
Energy and
Senex
Energy are all already active.

Brandenburg will pay for $US17 million ($15.98 million) to $US19 million of exploration work to earn a 44 per cent interest in the PEL112 and PEL444 licences, where it has identified 30 prospective oil leads. Of those, 10 have been characterised as “high-priority", holding a potential resource of 30 million barrels of oil, mostly in three target formations, the company said.

Oil deposits in the Western Flank of the Cooper Basin are typically modest in size, or 5-10 million barrels. But they can be lucrative to develop because of relatively low drilling costs, making payback periods as short as a few weeks in some cases.

Holloman started the search for a partner for its Cooper Basin exploration work early last year, but extensive flooding in central Australia has slowed the process.